


The Perfection of This Landscape

by TheColorBlue



Category: Set This House in Order - Matt Ruff
Genre: Gen, growing radishes, mental landscapes, multiplicity, plurality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-15
Updated: 2011-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-27 09:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/294268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seferis discovered that he was Greek by accident. While the body was some mixture of western European, Seferis discovered that he was Greek the evening that he and Adam went down to that Greek eatery after Seferis's kendo class.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Perfection of This Landscape

**Author's Note:**

> This story doesn't actually mesh well with the source material; I play it pretty fast and loose with characterization, background history, and the rules of the system, because actually, I'm kind of...uncomfortable with some of the ways in which Andrew Gage and his system are written about. There's a lot of good things in that book, but also a lot of uncomfortable things. I wrote this with the feeling that Seferis was the only character that _really_ intrigued me, and as far as everything else, _I don't give a bother_.

Seferis discovered that he was Greek by accident. While the body was some mixture of western European, Seferis discovered that he was Greek the evening that he and Adam went down to that Greek eatery after Seferis's kendo class. Adam hadn't done a lick of physical exercise, the bum, but he was the one saying how "fucking hungry he was" and "Seferis, I'm taking us out for dinner tonight." The lighting of the place was faintly yellowed and the air felt oily and scented with food. Adam ordered a pita with gyro sandwich, and Seferis had looked at the movie posters that decorated the small room. He had looked at the shape of the printed words, the style of the lettering.

 _Dude_ , Adam said. _I keep telling Aaron we should go out to see the new James Bond movie. Have a family movie night or something, and for the price of a single body's ticket! That stick in the mud needs the break anyway, I'm telling you._

Seferis was disinterested in the narrative of the film. He was looking at the letters of the advertisment poster, feeling a strange and familiar pull.

 _Hey, Seferis. Heyyy. The food's ready to be picked up_.

Seferis was the name that Sam had given him. Seferis was the name of a poet, but Seferis did not write poetry nor did he read much of anything. Seferis was somber and quiet. Actually, Seferis did not say much of anything either. His job was to defend the body, and although his soul was nearly six-feet tall, too large for the body by far--it had been his job to learn the feel of the body's muscles, the weight and the movement of it. He used the body like the mechanical armor that he saw in the Japanese animated shows that Jake and Adam liked to watch together. In the shows, the armor was much larger than the physical bodies of their pilots. Seferis's soul inside his body had the opposite relationship, but he had learned how to use the body like an extension of himself anyway. Perhaps that was why he was drawn to a sword-fighting art like kendo. The sword was an extension of himself, to be used like a part of his body.

Seferis looked at the poster for a moment longer, before letting Adam take the body to pick up their pita sandwich.

 _So. Fucking. Hungry_ , Adam said with relish, sitting down at one of the little tables by the wall and digging in.

Seferis slipped in to pick out a slice of red onion and eat it. He loved the crunch of the onion against his teeth, and the sharp, wet taste of it on his tongue.

\--

Seferis discovered that he was Greek in installments.

Every time Adam took them out for Greek food after Seferis's kendo classes, Seferis studied the posters on the walls. Then, when Aaron or Sam took them to the library to study for classes, Seferis picked up a copy of an English-and-Greek dictionary.

While Aaron and Sam argued inside the body about whose homework took precedent, Seferis watched their body, as well as all of their physical posessions. Sam's textbooks sat on one side. Aaron's on the other. Seferis picked up his dictionary, which he had added to Sam's pile of foreign language materials on his way past the reference shelves.

He thought for a moment, inbetween the sounds of Aaron and Sam bickering, to a word that might mean something to him, a word that could be used everyday. He flipped through the dictionary.

γεία σου, he tried out loud. He repeated the word out loud again, tasting the sound of it. γεία σου. _Hello_.

 _Oh, shit,_ Adam said, loitering around the edges of the pulpit as he usually did. A veritable peanut gallery of one. _Seferis fucking **talked**_.

The body's tongue felt awkward to use. It wasn't like moving the more distal limbs, the arms and the legs, feeling the weight and the balance of the shouders, the torso, the hips. Something felt wrong whenever Seferis tried to take this thoughts and form them into words. It was as though there was some kind of wall he'd been trying to force through, but the wall wouldn't budge. The sounds that came out of his mouth had always felt meaningless, disconnected, even when he knew in his head what they meant. Even when he could hear them coming out of other people's mouths, and he _knew_ what they meant.

Seferis leafed through the dictionary. He could feel something of a crowd watching him now. The yellowed pages of the dictionary felt delicate in his hand, as though they could shred like tissue if he moved through them too roughly.

μιλώ, he read.

μιλώ με θέρμη

 _To speak with feeling_.

Adam was jostling him from the pulpit, asking him why he was only talking in a foreign language, Greek rather than English.

Seferis closed the dictionary carefully, and just as carefully set it aside on the table, on the other side of Sam's French language textbook.

There was a tender feeling, like finding something familiar, which you had never realized that you had been missing. Seferis did not want to speak aloud again, just then, and break that fragile feeling. Not that he ever spoke much. He stepped aside in the pulpit so that the others could have their turn, and while Adam pestered him, and Sam asked, _dear, are you doing all right_ and Aaron wanted to know, in his more demanding way, _what's going on here_ \--Seferis went on in his calm way, gently, but firmly, moving Adam and then Jake out of his path. Jake trailed him on the stairs, like the little boy he was, with Adam bringing up the rear. Seferis went to his room, where no one would follow him, even Adam, though he could hearing Adam making nonsense sing-song and possibly vulgar noises from the other side of his door even after he'd closed it.

\--

Seferis grew radishes in the bed of soil just outside his window.

They weren't real radishes, so they grew as Seferis made them grow. Every morning after taking the body though his routine of push-ups and stretching, Seferis came back inside to his room and made the radishes grow a little more. He also grew sweet peas. He imagined the way that plants would grow: a little at a time, and in cycles. He pulled the radishes out after a few weeks, lining the bright red roots on his windowsill. The soil spread round in warm tracings against the wood. He'd plant new radish seeds, and new flower seeds, each time.

Seferis peered outside the panes of his window, to the color of the sky. Here inside the body's internal landscape, the sun always shone bright in the days, and the nights were always cloudless and star-filled. The moon waxed and waned in a perfect cyle. Seferis didn't sleep, so the nights were his, when the household was quiet, and there were no sounds of crickets unless Seferis imagined them into being, and sometimes Seferis allowed in the sounds of coyotes in the distance, because he wanted there to be a feeling of movement and life in the far-away woods that fringed the house, and otherwise the night would have been too perfect.

\--

Seferis was the defender of the body. That was his job. The job did not require speaking, so Seferis had never spoken, and even when Seferis discovered he _could_ speak, it was only in Greek, and there was still that mysterious feeling...

Aaron, the head of their house, was always trying to come up with reasonable explanations for everything. Sam understood French because she had learned it in high school. Jake had been born so that, somewhere in that mind, there would always be the light of an untouched childhood, the kind of light that had existed before their stepfather's evils. Seferis existed because the body had needed someone, a silent protector, through all their years of suffering domestic violence, and then their stints of forced insitutionalization. Seferis existed because he had a job to do.

None of those ideas explained the Greek. They didn't explain Seferis's love of radishes, or his love of silence and solitude that contrasted with his fierce desire to keep physical harm from being done to anyone. The last wasn't some kind of automatic function, it was a feeling that Seferis kept clasped tight like a talisman.

Seferis did not mind being a defender of the body, he did not mind that Aaron was the self-appointed alpha male of their household, he did not mind that Adam was always following him, pestering endlessly as he pestered everyone else. He did not mind a lot of things. His life was satisfactory in many respects.

And yet there was still that mysterious feeling. It was a feeling like the edge of their woods might have been the edges of the body's mind-space, but there was something still out there, even beyond, just as there was something inside of Seferis, silent and unfathomable, even to himself.

\--

The sunlight through the windows warmed the air. The woods were a shadow that went round the house and the lake.

Seferis opened the windows to his bedroom, and took a little spade so that he could loosen the soil around his radishes. He looked down at the sprays of leaves, poking out of the bed of earth.

He wanted them to grow.


End file.
